doom letter #6

Consumers of Doom,

I haven’t written much for a couple of weeks, and my last significant post was about Stephen Fowler’s appearance on Wife Swap. The thing that I learned from that post is that people pay far more attention to reality TV than they do to anything that I consider to be important. I think that the response was appropriate to Fowler’s appearance, but I honestly don’t care much about him or the online backlash. It was nice to see a bump in my traffic, but I didn’t notice a lot of extended interest in the rest of what I am writing about on this website.

Since my last post I have had some family maintenance to tend to, and I also spent this past Saturday standing outside of a couple of tax loan stores trying to raise awareness about how fucked up Refund Anticipation Loans are for the working poor. The result of my little protest, with my friend Drew Duzinskas, was insignificant but it clearly got under the skin of the Franchisees of the two Liberty Tax offices we picketed. I don’t think this picket was overly important, I mostly did it for fun but I did have an incredibly frustrating conversation with a representative from the Liberty Tax management team. He declined to give me his name, and refused to allow us to record the conversation but he said some things that were interesting. First, he told me that RALs are not an income source for Liberty Tax at all, although I find that a little hard to believe. He also told me that only 1/3 of his clients qualify for a RAL, which is good. Unfortunately, he was unwilling to do anything serious to change the way he was doing business, which of course is no surprise to me.

Like I said, the picket was not that important to me. In the big picture, I don’t think that even getting the poor people that are targeted for RALs to realize they are getting fucked over would make any difference. In other words, the people that are dumb enough to get a RAL probably won’t change their lifestyle in a way that fits in with the way I see the future until someone (the government) or something (reality) forces them to do so. Until then they will continue their relentless pursuit of stuff, at least the vast majority of them will.

So, from these two reflections, I wonder what the point of community outreach would be? And even more so, what is the point of “being awake” when everybody around you is still asleep? Regarding our picket, you can’t educate someone who doesn’t care to learn, or buys into the establishment mystification of (fill in the blank with nearly any subject) and refuses to try to figure shit out on their own. In my eyes they probably are not worth my time, although it is fun to get out and cause some ruckus every now and again. And fun does count for something, if for nothing more than an enjoyable way to pass the time. Regarding the Stephen Fowler thing, I don’t know how to get my point across any more clearly than what I did in my previous letter – that Fowler is the problem because he is an elitist asshole and he and his ilk are positioned to take a prominent role in the mitigation of peak oil. That scares the shit out of me, but I can’t do much about it and even if I do something it might not be the right something anyway.

The point of this letter is that I don’t know. I don’t know what the future will bring, I only have a little better idea than most. I don’t know what to do to address the problems about which I am concerned beyond making myself more self-reliant and less economically, socially and psychologically dependent on the systems which I think are bound to fail. I like the idea of being a part of a community, but I am coming to realize that may not mean community in any sense greater than me and a few people that “get it” and are thinking about what to do now that they do get it.

In the background of my own little insecurities, the great big world seems to be inching closer to the tipping point at which the real economy finally starts to look like the techno-financial fantasy economy that has propped up the collectively conjured affluence of America. I have said to friends recently that unfortunately this is just another recession, but it seems as though reality wants to make it a pretty special one. In the short-term, it can go either way. In the long term, it has no direction to go but back toward reality. For most of America, that means living standards that are much more like the majority of the world and much less like the future the vast majority is still planning for.

I read and listen to a lot of people that I think are smart talk about this to look for some trend or some consensus. But it doesn’t seem to be showing up in any meaningful way. Kunstler likes to call suburbia the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of civilization. I think that the next few years might make it pale by comparison. When the people that know what the problems are – a housing bubble, a credit bubble, outdated/unnecessary infrastructure – devise a solution that involves giving people money to buy housing and cars while trying to revive the credit market, I get nervous. I also see it as validation that there are no decent long-term mitigation options available at a high-level. After all, representative government isn’t set up to be visionary. The nature of the system is to be reactive. Once a problem presents itself in a way that is pervasive and obvious to a majority, then and only then will a plan be put into place to address the problem.

I hope that things are getting scary and exciting, but you know the saying about getting your hopes up…

doomfully yours,

mike